The principle with which I have selected concepts to explore in these essays, those that can be drawn and seen, favors older explanations such as those of lunar phases and of submerged bodies over more recent, less visualizable ones such as those of the global greenhouse effect and of the Higgs boson. Other important contributions to twentieth- and twenty-first-century physics, probability distributions, black holes, chaos, entanglement, and gravity waves did not make the cut because I could not easily represent them in a drawing. No doubt, our drive toward inventing new ways to see physics will, in time, allow these topics to be grasped visually.
Because Drawing Physics is composed of fifty-one separate essays, the connections among them may not be apparent. Consider, for instance, that the theorists who predicted the Higgs boson (essay 51) built upon an approach pioneered by Enrico Fermi who, in the course of modeling beta decay (essay 47), fashioned the first version of a field theory of the elementary particles and their fundamental forces. Fermi’s field theory, in turn, owes much to Maxwell’s 1865 theory of electromagnetism (essay 37) and to Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity. Yet Maxwell’s electromagnetism incorporates Faraday’s concept of electric and magnetic field lines (essay 36), while Einstein’s theory of special relativity generalizes the relativity of Galileo. The kinematics that embeds Galilean relativity (essays 20 and 21) appeals to observations on falling bodies made fifty years earlier by Simon Stevin (essay 15) and one thousand years earlier by John Philoponus (essay 10) and, also, to the geometrical language invented by Oresme and the Merton College scholars (essay 12). Philoponus’s observations critique Aristotle theory of motion (essay 5) just as Aristotle had earlier critiqued Thales’s cosmology (essay 1). Other threads of understanding, each contribution depending upon others, could be traced through the essays.
Only physics and astronomy, among the empirical sciences, can claim an intellectual tradition of such compass: 2,600 years from Thales to Higgs. And no other science appeals so directly to the visible world. The visual emblems of this tradition and their human and historical context define the content of Drawing Physics.